Book Club Survey Results and Announcement of the First Meeting

Book Club Name Reveal , First Book Selection and Guiding Principles

We are really excited to finally make the formal announcement of the Mastermind for Food Writers Book Club. We think it should be called the Food Readers’ Book Club.

As some of you may know already, the idea was born while I (Liza Debevec) was reading a Diana Henry book of essays over a glass of vermut in Barcelona. So many of you responded positively when I asked about this in the Chat. (By the way, if you are not familiar with the Chat section of the Mastermind for Food Writers, here is the link to it: https://substack.com/chat/4928070). Linda Naylor who writes TASTE | Pacific Northwest stepped up to support this venture as a co-host and here we are.

A couple of weeks ago we did a survey to which 32 of you responded (Thank You!) and we found out that most of you love to read anything food related (meaning: food essays, food memoirs, food related fiction and cookbooks).

Your preferred food related reading

The majority of the responders preferred the quarterly meetings, and that is what we will be doing.

Preferred frequency of meetings

We discussed the choice of books. We each proposed some titles we had either read and loved or were curious about. Linda did the grunt work of finding out which of the books were available though the US library system or for purchase on websites that were not Amazon related. We offered you the choice of 18 books with a request to select your top five choices; here are the results:

Top choices for the book club selection

As you can see, the book that inspired the creation of this book club, Diana Henry’s Around the Table, actually came in as the top choice for the majority, followed closely by Apricots on the Nile by Collete Rossant and Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin.

Diana Henry’s essay collection was the top choice (Photo: Liza Debevec)

We are happy to announce that our first Food Readers’ Book Club session will take place on Wednesday, June 3, 2026 at 8 am PDT, 11 am EDT, 4pm UK time and 5 pm CET.¹ We will meet for 90 minutes and we will be reading Diana Henry’s book Around the Table: 52 essays on Food and Life. After that, we will meet the 1st week of September and the 1st week of December when we will be reading Collete Rossant (September) and Laurie Colwin (December).

We will do a short write-up for each of the books; for now, we are sharing the guiding principles of this book club, inspired by adrienne maree brown’s principle 8 of the nine core principles from her book Emergent Strategy: Less prep, more presence.

With this in mind, we (Linda and Liza) will be guiding the book club by offering our presence and full attention, but may not always come prepared with specific questions or topics for discussion (and sometimes we may come with many of them). We will be paying attention to topics that emerge from the conversation; we invite all the book club members to embrace the idea of presence over preparation. This means that you are welcome to come to the discussion even if you only just purchased the book and have not read it, or if you have read the book five times and have taken a ton of written notes.

In the sessions we will be facilitating the conversation in ways that will be inclusive of all and mindful of different styles of communication. We may opt to create breakout groups to facilitate small group discussions. When in plenary we will ask people to raise their hands before speaking and be mindful of the time they take to speak, so that those of us who are chattier (like Liza) do not make it impossible for less talkative people (like Linda) to express their thoughts. That said, you do not have to talk; you could just come and listen, if that is your vibe.

We may, at times, invite members to help co-lead a discussion, and if you are very keen to support us in this way, feel free to reach out to us via DMs.

As a way of offering support to readers for whom new book purchases may not be budgeted, may we suggest a post by a U.K. writer entitled “Library Access for Everyone.” Several U.S. libraries offer digital library cards to international readers for an annual fee, though not every library can be assumed to have every title. For everyone else, we encourage you to find a way to support independent/small bookstores. There are a lot of great alternatives to Amazon everywhere, if we make an effort to look for those.

This is all we have for you for now. We will share the registration link for the meeting in early May when we share our shared post with some of our thoughts and notes on the book. We hope many of you will join and until then we wish you Happy Reading!

1. We understand that this time is not convenient for our members in most of the Asia Pacific time zones. If you’d like to make the case for an additional meeting that serves those time zones, let us know by sending us a DM. It would be great if you could consider (co)hosting such a meeting, as that would make it easier for us.